Abstract

In this lecture I examine the production of mobility obstacles and restrictions in Palestine, highlighting dimensions of the logistics of border crossings and movement in the West Bank in relation to disability rights frameworks. I argue two things: one, that the creation of what Celeste Langan terms “mobility disabilities” through corporeal assault as well as infrastructural and bureaucratic means are not only central to the calculus of the occupation, but importantly, linked logics of debilitation; and two, that these calibrations of various types of movement render specific stretchings of space and time, what I call slow life.

Jasbir K. Puar

Jasbir K. Puar is professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of the award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which has been translated into French and Spanish and re-issued as an expanded edition for its 10th anniversary (Duke University Press, 2017).

Puar’s recently published book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017) takes up the relations between biopolitics, disability, and forms of active debilitation pivotal to the operations of war machines and racial capitalism. The book appears in a new series, ANIMA, which she co-edits with Mel Chen.